It goes on one at a time,it starts when you care to act,it starts when you do it again after they said no,it starts when you say we and know who you mean,and each day you mean one more.

Culture Matters is pleased to announce that the second Bread and Roses Poetry Award, sponsored by Unite, is now open for entries.

Details are as follows:

Entries should consist of one original, previously unpublished poem, no more than 50 lines long.

Entrants must be resident in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland

Entry is free, and open to anyone regardless of trade union membership.

There will be five prizes of £100 each; an award ceremony in Durham on 13 July linked to the Miners’ Gala, with travel and accommodation costs paid; and publication of all the outstanding poems in the 2018 anthology

Entries should broadly deal with working class life, communities and culture. Themes might include work; the position and perspective of women; political issues of any kind; and art and culture.

Entries should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by midnight on Friday 8 June, or by post to Culture Matters, c/o 8 Moore Court, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE15 8QE. Please include your name, address, contact details and the poem in the body of the email.

my mother’s face exists in the space between kaijū and sphinx. she’s wearing clothes that holdher body in contempt. her breath, imperfect peppermint. she has to go to work. her earringsare obols, shorn of their funerary usage. palestflirtation of dubious gold. unclaimed merestflick of skin, the seldom-surfaced self. ourmother holds down several jobs, like righteous men might trample serpents underfoot. sheworks in the kitchens of holiday parks, spitingher wrists with the ambergris of hot fat; saltin the cut to her thumb. she works, waitressingtables, while little kids scream with tactless joy, engineering ice-cream headache, on and on. our mother’s scanned your hummocksof steroidal meat for hours, her hands making a dumb-show of séance. she cried like a tangled cassette in the night when she thought wecouldn’t hear. our mother worked lates with the cold coiled inside like a sharpened spring at the twenty-four seven garage to tight to payfor heat. she gritted her teeth through gregarioussleaze in the small town slur of the local bar. and she came home and kneaded the breadlike she was thumping breath back into a stopped heart. she held me through all myrecalcitrant havoc, the voices we heard inour heads between god and the vomit, ourgremlins and lurgies and rages. my motherstudied. in those hotbed-of-non-event towns,she dug in her heels, and she bit back her anger. not a shoulder to cry on, a humanshield, her backbone a needle of lightning. she studied, defended, and cleaned on herknees till she bruised. my mother, our mother,unfolding the joke from a book that the worldhad kept from her. my mother, comingsudden on the mind’s reckless hieroglyphs:i finally understand. my mother’s face existsbetween the strange and the wise. and we catchher sometime, when she’s only herself, dreamingher private tumult. my mother works, tillingthe stony earth until a word strikes water and everything wickedly greens for a moment.this is the grace that shit is grist to. it’s thanksto her we are free.

Fran Lock has curated this year’s compilation of poetry for Culture Matters, to mark International Women’s Day. There are poems by Jane Burn, Sogol Sur, Joanne Key, Julia Bell, Anne Pelleschi, Beri Allen-Miller, and Fran herself, ending with a prose piece, On Fighting the Disconnect.

Introduction

When you put out a call for poetry submissions, you never know what you’ll get back. It’s a dangerous game, like asking questions of the Ouija Board, inviting a strangeness into your life, something maverick, haunting and twisted. This time was a little different, though; the women I reached out to being writers I’d admired for long time, and people I knew would have something to say on a subject that’s extremely close to my heart.

In the approach to International Women’s Day I started thinking about poetry’s potential as a kind of counter narrative, a way of exposing the hidden histories of women, stories and experiences that are erased or ignored by the general discourses of everyday life. When I asked these poets to contribute to Culture Matters, I suggested they send something that speaks to the material reality of being a working-class woman, of the struggles and joys that are uniquely ours, of the headspace those struggles create, of the ways we find to navigate the world and understand ourselves.

Which is easier said than done. What does it even mean to be “working-class” and a woman, here and now, when “work” itself is a vexed notion? How does gender interact with labour? How does labour interact with sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and with the hundred-billion other ways the world has of defining us?

These poems don’t answer all those questions. What emerges instead is a polyphony of voices across a wide range of cultures, experiences and generations. These poems, I think, exist as a proof that imagination takes root here, in us, in however inauspicious or infertile seeming the ground of our daily grind. Creativity unites us, and creativity is our best form of resistance and resilience.

Jane Burn

Jane Burn has had poems in The Rialto, Under the Radar, Butcher's Dog, Iota Poetry as well as anthologies from The Emma Press, Beautiful Dragons, Emergency Poet & Seren. She is the author of three books: Fat Around the Middle (Talking Pen), Tongues of Fire (BLERoom), and nothing more to it than bubbles (Indigo Dreams).

Jane writes:The seed of this poem, Let me tell you about, was sown late last year when I attended a local poetry night. One of the open mic poets was a young, very well-spoken man in his early twenties. His poem was about a sexual encounter he had had (for real or imaginary, I do not know) with a woman he considered less than himself. They did what he imagined were the usual 'roughing-it' things like going to Lidl. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas in his poem and when he spoke the line, 'chav girls need love too' which was meant to justify his 'slumming it', I walked out. I have been so angry about it ever since - the very idea that someone is to be treated thus because of where they were born is abhorrent. That they are just a 'girl'. As if there is a better class of person that can dabble with those who are lesser human beings. Oh yes, you can screw the common women for a laugh but you sure wouldn't take them home to meet the folks.

There is still a divide - there are still children growing up with less opportunity than others and judging by people like the man I mentioned above, there are still people growing up with the attitude that they are a better class of person. Perhaps he thought his poem was a witty little joke - perhaps he would be suprised to discover how offensive I found it to be.

Let me tell you about

potatoes bought by the sackleaving school still not being sure what a noun istrying to fill the gaps left by a crap educationhand-me-downs from them up the streetJan’s, where you asked for a bob and came out looking like your nanlicking the back of Co-op stampspaddling in the slipway at Thorne, avoiding a floating shit dipping in Kayli’s rainbow and puckering at the taste auntie’s handbags full of copper-filth tuppence smellcontemplating the scrapyard’s matted dogmy mother selling her ringsthe cliché of three inches of bathwater eachknowing absolutely nothing about winethe uncertainty of pastathe raw song of the siren’s end of shift being made to wait on doorsteps while other people went ina boy with fiststhe oompah band and how I loved The Floral Dancethe horse with strangles on the dealer’s yardhow my parents were never sure if they should take off their coatscurdles of Artex on every ceiling and wallSkegnessthe fear that I might end up in the sewing factoryhow a lathe is softened by a fascination of swarf how I felt when I discovered that anyone can be an archaeologistthe first time I ate a courgettecalling lunch, dinner and dinner, teahow it feels when someone mimics the way you speakbeing good enough to fuck but not good enough to date ending up working a supermarket tillfeeling the smoothness of others snag upon your scuffbeing haunted by your rough-built selfwatching people hide what they really thinkknowing there is nothing more ahead than there is behind.

*Jane writes:Horses have been the most important thing to me for as long as I can remember. At four years old I used to balance on a precarious stack of buckets and try to scramble upon the fat roan back of a pony who lived on a nearby farm. I walked for three miles to where the local show was held throughout the summer and stood until the last horse had gone. From the age of twelve I worked evening and weekends in a dealers yard - I was not paid for the huge amount of work I did but I got to ride and be with the creatures that were the most important things to me.One of our 'treats' was to sometimes be taken to Pannal Sales, Yorkshire. I had such fantastical ideals when it came to these beloved animals. The reality of the sales was something I have never fogotten.

A Day at Pannal Sales

These are not the horses of your dreams.These are pens of steaming piebald hides,tangles of splaying legs, shit-spattered hocks. Ears back, too afraid to come to you over the gates – throats raw with heaved wind, bellies fat with worms,

ridge tile spines, a din of screams.These are not the horses you usually see.These are hunters, jumpers too long in the tooth – foundered ponies, sadly outgrown mother’s dreams,cuckoo bolters, biters, buckers, lame ducks

doped on bute. Stallions, cresty, frothed and rakedabout the lorry park to flash a high-kneed step.You will sit at the ring and wish you were rich.Guineas are bid over whipped-up hidesand the gibberish hubbada hubbada dubbada

auctioneer’s talk litters the day with hopeor hopelessness, depending on whose hand is raised.You will not forget the gated rampof the meat man’s truck, nor the weanling Shetlands,small as dogs, furzy as teddies, eyes like

portions of God walking mildly up it.You will not forget the sound of a mare’s grief,udder bagged for a foal’s milky crave.The hat-rack shire with a Father Christmas beard.These are not the horses of your dreams.

*The witch who lives on the hill

Maybe there is something of the wanderer in me – I have this problem with rooting. Not tree but tumbleweed, rolled into corners, bumping its fragile netted head. Dust settles on me, weighs me down. I wish I knewmy history – I wish I knew who I was. I don’t fit –

my dogs are cut from patchwork cloth, bite slow fingers. My ponies is feathered and splotched with white. He only needs a wagon, Tommy-The-Tooth-Man said – he ran racehorses in Ireland, is bones like a bird, fears nothing. I’m always after seeing their souls – horses will show

them to you, given time. You ought not to be on their backs until you are in their hearts. I see those neighbours, clocking my trousers, muddy-wet bum from sitting low, learning their unicorn talk. I hope their curtain twitching brings them what they wish for. Her garden. Looks like

a rubbish dump. Why would you want rusty things? I got to keep my eye out for the scrap-man, sneaky bastard – he’s got a right lust for my stuff. Bucket rotted to its scaffold form, horseshoes, iron rabbit, old pot-belly stove. This clutter, in its corrosion was a shiny something once. The beauty is in how

I lost count of the times folk have tried to insult me with this. I’ll wish on clover for them – fuckers. I know they peep through my windows, mutter at my Dead Man’s Swag. I crave cabinets, the kind that you filled with china birds.I have to scrub the stink of ciggs from, smelling like memories

of failed lungs and death. Roam the car-boots for bitsto fill them – then they are bright as bowtops, spangle of chintz, porcelain birds. I look at a plate on a stall. Bloke says hurry up and buy it – if you won’t, the Syrians will. They pause to tut outside my house. Pretty soon

they’ll be genuflecting, spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch,calling to the Saints to preserve them. Why don’t you park down your own end? The phone-wire box on the street corner is opened, wires spilled – this man in his fluoro tabard,crouches in front, confused at the spew of guts. At the tip

of every one, a voice – if you could press your ear to the mass you need never be lonely again. There’s Betty, face like a wasp,pressed to the glass, wishing me ill and I am meant to be the witch. Her mouth is a poisoned bud. This used to be a nice street. Starlings roost on her ridge tiles. Kids kick balls in her hedge.

Sogol Sur

Sogol Sur is the author of the poetry collection, Sorrows of the Sun (Skyscraper, 2017). She is currently undertaking a PhD in creative writing at Birkbeck, and working on her debut short story collection.

Inheritance

One presumes one has everything to loseOne enters the office, the bureau for bureaucracy, an embassy, a ministry, a roomful

You have to prove to them why you exist; why you need your inheritance although the term and the concept soil your mouthnewly-shed blood in a lucid lake spreading, an indestructible virusthis money, two-thirds of a professor’s salary is the only thing you have inherited from your mother - apart from her lust for the impossible,unacceptable ambitions, and sudden-death genes.

You need the money, you tell them, your mouth churning, turning, withering, a diseased flower in garbage. Your father has sent you. He is pulling invisible strings. What strings? What country? What inheritance? Why do you think you exist? What mother? What father? They don’t utter this, but you can hear itfor by now you know a motherless woman is not a womanbut a rootless tree, carved and scarred by a myriad of artless passersby, its branches cut and thrown in a deep swamp.

They shout at you without uttering a sound: Your country does not exist. It died with your mother. We don’t owe you any money. You don’t have any power How would you pull strings? Which strings? Why do you think you’re special? All the strings were buried with your mother in that grave. In that crowded cemetery where your body bent without your involvement and you heard a man - a far relative - say, ‘she’s okay, it’s probably just stomach ache,’ and you were surprised by your lack of desire to beat him to death.

But you did wish god or something like that existed and could resurrect your mother instead of ordering you to look chaste and you glanced at your mother’s sister in her black chador, praying at her sister’s tomb. And for the first time in your life you envied her you needed something, anything to hold on tobut there was nothing.

When they collected you from your mother’s grave, you couldn’t hold on to them because you knew they were nothing. And there was nothing again to hold on to.

And every time you go to a sweaty office to claim her money you wish you were buried with her in that grey cemetery for you know there is nothing to claim, nothing to hold on to when you’re a motherless woman in your twenties with a painful passport and you hear voices in your head that logically you are aware don’t exist, yet they are as deafening as the rain knocking on your window during Tehran winter showers. And the vociferation:Take off your fake hijabWho do you think you’re fooling?We know youYou’re not meant to exist.

Joanne Key

Joanne Key lives in Cheshire where she writes poetry and short fiction. She recently returned to university as a mature student to complete an MA in Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire. She has previously been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, Mslexia Poetry Competition and The Plough Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in magazines including The Interpreter’s House; Ink, Sweat and Tears; and Nutshells and Nuggets. She won second prize in The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2014.

Sleepers

At fifteen, my wires trailed behind me like loose shoelaces. Despite the cable, snaking under my ribs, the feathersstarted to poke through the cuffs of my school jumper. A dangerto myself, the men saidI could take off anytimeand should be sent to the factory where my mind would be occupiedwith minding the machines, tending them, mending my ways.The factory and its banner: Set Aside All Thoughts of Flight.My father gave it the green lightas he sat on his rusty throne, flexing the hinges of his fists,smoke and booze flowing through his steel tubes.

And so they squeezed me into line with the other women, side by side, forced in as tight as batteries. The siren howled. A door clanged shut.That was that.The machines ate everything: days, words, music, news. I watched them swallow some women whole.We called them Sleepers.I saw my mother slip awayuntil all that was left was her voice humming in the drum of its stomach. The factory took the sun, the doves cooing on the roof, the chatter and laughterand pitter-patter of rain, leaving us only with the sound of crying on fire escapes and the moaning of Sleepers trapped deep inside the machines.

Nothing lasts forever. Many years have passed, but on lonely nights like thismy mother often flits back into my life. Owl-eyedand full of light, she sitson the windowsill,preening her feathers,before disappearing again, her shape fading from viewas she circles the ruins of the factory, picking over the bones of those oldworn-out systems. So many times I have tried to call her back, my face at the window – pale and plain as a blank clock. Mouth clicking. Open. Shut.

Julia Bell

Julia Hephzibah Bell is a writer and Course Director of the MA Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She is the author of three novels and the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook. Currently she is working on lyric essays and poetry. Hymnal is a verse memoir about growing up in a religious family in Wales. And she is currently working on a sequence of essays about Berlin. Two of these essays will feature in forthcoming editions of Wasafiri and The White Review. She currently divides her time between London and Berlin.

The Visiting Speaker

But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? - Luke 10:40

Typical. The minute there’s a man about the houseshe’s off, leaving me to get on with the gutting of fish, the buttering of bread.Sitting there, simpering, playing with herbeads in that idle, flirty way that makes her look cheap.

Five loaves and fishes and then somepiled on the table, there’s at least fifty people coming,it will take a miracle to get this done in time.And all she cares about is boys, boys, boys,turned into a simpleton the minute they arrived.

Our hands butterflied across the table, slicing, dicing, picking bones, tossing salads, while we debated the various defences of Kierkegaard,and the finer points of the theories of mind,and then when he arrived she emptied like a drain

When I went out to complain all he could saywas there were more important things than cookingin that kind of hippie, dreamy way that she believesis a substitute for thinking. See here, he said, picking a flower, consider the lilies of the field.

And she lay next to him, giggling, rococo, as if posing for a Titian. God, that made me mad. Here I am up to my eyeballs in dishes,and all she can think about is sex. What good are flowers when the clock is ticking on the Sunday roast?

He’s no idea what it’s like pulled every which way, clean this, cook that, where’s my clean shirt? He might have time for stargazing, but me, I have to keep the carrots from boiling over. A martyr? Don’t be soft. I’m losing my mind in here.

Anne Pelleschi

Anne hails from Swansea, South Wales, and her life and work have evolved from her Welsh origins. She is the organiser of international literary events and an international creative writing competition. Closer to home she established Dylan Thomas's birthplace as a successful centre celebrating his early life, and for holding workshops and events, including poetry readings. She is a regular speaker on Thomas' life nationally and internationally. Anne has organised arts festivals in local parks and created 'Welsh Mams' Day. Her work is drawn from her lifetime experiences in which people and place provide centrality to her sense of iterative historical and emotional consciousness.

1832, for a mother

They call me a Murder Stone, though I have killed no-one. My role was not to take a life but to record one that was brutally shortened.

I am so tired, worn out, worn down, my once loud voice has disappeared, gone. I am a pock marked slab of misery where pointing fingers chiselled into me.

They call me a Murder Stone, though I have killed no-one.

I was chosen, hand-picked and quarried in Mawr, there is no-one alive to remember why now, so I must tell you before I fade, before the earth re-claims me and becomes my grave.

My role was not to take a life but to record one.

I am weak and leaning on an old chapel wall. As your feet pass by or your car engines thrum, you do not notice me yet I am the one who remembers the truth.

They call me a Murder Stone, though I have killed no-one.

Look for me in Felindre, look for me. Find me and discover about an unborn child, about Eleanor, its mother

Circles

On that sultry, weeping-cloud day, I watched her sitting room's furniture be moved and switched, re-switched, re-moved. I saw pain take control of a face that was drawn, a soul that was torn between despair and survival.

A blank worn canvas outlines of deep silences tears left un-spilled

Gasping breaths were her voice as she paced and twitched, stood still, sat down, opened cupboards, slammed their doors, apologised, searched, spinning round and around.

Those old training shoes trying to make sense of it a tongue sticking out

Into a quiet, whimpering stillness, words emerged from their swallowing, smothering cocoon and filled the room. Whispering into her neckline, she spoke about that morning, thehat mis-shaped, the ugly morning and the note that was left by her door.

Now only shadows quick silvered running footsteps a broken marriage

Beri Allen-Miller

Beri Allen-Miller is a poet and photographer currently living in Hertfordshire.

Commuter's Flu

hammering nails into my head to let the pain out i’m tired of being ice picked chipping holes into cold cold coldmelting little dripsinto the eyes of wiser guys

“peanut butter mix it up mess with me ill kick your butt”i’m never going to let my heart shed ive got a brain i hideuse it selfishly they say i was born in soft focusa little vaseline on the lens a little tinsel around the eyes.

i put my hood up relax my accenthiss into a blunt little minute 70 70 70 tangled up in my hair i was rocked by smoke finding with my fingers my core centralising light she a peony prototype power i sit with it let it alight get off of the brim of my hat covering my eyes with your tiny palms i am pushing out noises in breathy punches scaling through vowels.

Palpate

There is only so much a voice can dothe girl piercing the old men whispering about her brain I dart into myself - a beea bug with an eye for contagion and keeping my teeth aligned isharder than holding a drill into skin - a bee direct but fatally scared - a bug with a dark glint and quietly amber in temper and colour amber in coffin

I can hear the flesh of all of the sewn together menthey don’t fit me wellI can’t speak or talk Take me in your carpark us near the seaside -the sea is our bedroomIt’s a chore to roll over if I don’t have two small pulses to encourage one eye or both you see in me, a bracing for potency

You strain to make me larger this splinter is no goodit has ruined to such impossible depthstweezers will not do they become too foreign at the side of my skin

I draw my family tree on my stomach, it’s all images written in flexing marks and I am told I am lost, love is recycled into threads

Fran Lock

our mother’s day will come

my mother’s face exists in the space between kaijū and sphinx. she’s wearing clothes that holdher body in contempt. her breath, imperfect peppermint. she has to go to work. her earringsare obols, shorn of their funerary usage. palestflirtation of dubious gold. unclaimed merestflick of skin, the seldom-surfaced self. ourmother holds down several jobs, like righteous men might trample serpents underfoot. sheworks in the kitchens of holiday parks, spitingher wrists with the ambergris of hot fat; saltin the cut to her thumb. she works, waitressingtables, while little kids scream with tactless joy, engineering ice-cream headache, on and on. our mother’s scanned your hummocksof steroidal meat for hours, her hands making a dumb-show of séance. she cried like a tangled cassette in the night when she thought wecouldn’t hear. our mother worked lates with the cold coiled inside like a sharpened spring at the twenty-four seven garage to tight to payfor heat. she gritted her teeth through gregarioussleaze in the small town slur of the local bar. and she came home and kneaded the breadlike she was thumping breath back into a stopped heart. she held me through all myrecalcitrant havoc, the voices we heard inour heads between god and the vomit, ourgremlins and lurgies and rages. my motherstudied. in those hotbed-of-non-event towns,she dug in her heels, and she bit back her anger. not a shoulder to cry on, a humanshield, her backbone a needle of lightning. she studied, defended, and cleaned on herknees till she bruised. my mother, our mother,unfolding the joke from a book that the worldhad kept from her. my mother, comingsudden on the mind’s reckless hieroglyphs:i finally understand. my mother’s face existsbetween the strange and the wise. and we catchher sometime, when she’s only herself, dreamingher private tumult. my mother works, tillingthe stony earth until a word strikes water and everything wickedly greens for a moment.this is the grace that shit is grist to. it’s thanksto her we are free.

On Fighting the Disconnect

The teenage girl on the bus is wearing a white T-shirt with the words I AM A FEMINST printed on the front in stark inch-high black letters. It’s dark outside and she’s travelling alone, so, when a group of boys get on at the next stop and bundle upstairs into the seats behind her, making the usual lewd and nonsensical comments, I swap seats to sit with her. I don’t want to come off like a dick, or imply that she needs protecting, but I want her to know she’s got help if she needs it, so I ask her if I can sit down, and to make conversation I tell her I like her T-shirt. “Thanks”, she says, and drops the name of a thoroughly ubiquitous online retailer whose ethical policies might want a bit of rethink, their supply chain having been linked in recent years to the labour of refugee children; with their British-based warehouses the subject of widely reported exposés into exploitative and dangerous working conditions. I don’t say anything, but it does give me private pause. The workers in sweatshops and warehouses are typically women and girls, and it’s hard for me to imagine anything more cynical than the way consumer culture regurgitates this cosmetic and morally-compromised feminism to idealistic young women.

Somewhere there’s a disconnect. But maybe it was ever thus. Take Rosie the Riveter, that oft-copied icon of female “empowerment”. Rosie was designed by J Howard Miller, and her purpose wasn’t liberation, it was propaganda. Rosie was supposed to mobilise a workforce, and she did: between 1942 and 1945 over six million women in America alone took up new jobs to further the allied war effort, many of whom started work in the factories before their employers had issued standard uniforms and safety equipment. Before 1943, for example, steel-toed boots weren’t made in women’s sizes, and women welders regularly sustained injury working in their everyday clothes without proper protective gear. Agencies that could have stepped in and stepped up to outfit women with safe and appropriate clothing didn’t consider it worth their while. They were only temporary, after all, an expendable substitute for male workers drafted overseas.

In the U.K, the women working in munitions factories turned yellow from exposure to TNT, earning them the euphemistic nickname: the canary girls. Although this discolouration was temporary, other side-effects were far more ominous. Women developed bone disintegration, throat and lung problems, and a fatal liver disease known as toxic jaundice. All this to earn a scant half the amount of their male counterparts, and while being expected to conform to an idealised and unobtainable standard of beauty that was considered as much a part of their “duty” to the war effort as the factory work in which they were employed.

Rosie’s a suspect symbol, the acceptable face of female labour; she isn’t jaundiced or exhausted or malnourished or maimed. She’s a fetish, a wet-dream, she’d working-class drag with the edges sanded off. She obscures not exposed the complex reality of what it means to be a working woman.

Somewhere there’s a disconnect. As IWWD rolls round again this year I find myself dwelling on this disconnect more and more. As a buzzword feminism is everywhere, and I want to take comfort from that, but I’ve seen a lot and I’m naturally wary. When companies and celebrities position themselves as “feminist” in order to encourage consumption or legitimate their views, I am wary. When conversations about equality are reduced to a grubby little cash nexus, I am wary. When the idea of real and necessary systemic change is diverted into the celebration of spurious cultural “gains”, I am wary.

Fundamentally, I don’t give a shit if L'Oreal or any one of its feckless spokespeople think I’m worth it, because “beauty” as an arbiter of personal worth is meaningless to me, especially when “beauty” means relentlessly performing some grotesque notion of exploded femininity twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, something that isn’t remotely practicable for most working-class women with dirty and difficult jobs.

Fundamentally, I think there are more urgent and important issues at work right now than whether a boardroom Tory earns the same amount as her male equivalent. Yes, of course, we should work towards parity of pay in business, but this can’t be the only measure of whether feminism is succeeding. The question of economic equality needs first to consider the working conditions of the poorest in our society; needs to start with the fruit-pickers and warehouse factory packers, needs to understand the connection between the convenience of your next-day delivery and the woman in Grimethorpe breaking her back on minimum wage to make that happen.

Fundamentally, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference if Jodie Whittaker is Doctor Who, or if we have a gender-flipped Ghost Busters, when women in Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre are still on hunger strike for being detained unfairly and indefinitely in demeaning and dangerous conditions; when cuts to Child Benefit coupled with restrictions to access of Legal Aid trap threaten to women in poverty and domestic abuse.

My point, I suppose, is that wearing the T-shirt is fine, idealism is fine, but feminism isn’t a slogan, it isn’t an aspirational brand, and wearing the T-shirt isn’t fighting the patriarchy. Feminism requires something of us, requires joined up thinking and a sense of our responsibility to each other. Feminism requires class-consciousness, an attentive listening to the varied voices of working-class experience.

30 years ago at approx 3.30pm Mairéad Farrell was murdered by the British state on Gibraltar. Standing by her side, also with his hands in the air, was Dan McCann who was also shot dead. A few hundred metres away Sean Savage was to have a similar fate. At the inquest the forensic scientist who examined Sean's remains said his killing had been a "frenzied attack" There were 29 bullet wounds in his body. All three were unarmed.

The following extract from a poem by Jack Mitchell is presented to mark the anniversary, and to mark International Women's Day.

While, in their caves, at state expense,These troglodytes of violenceWere taught tricks of the terror trade,Outside, Gibraltarians paidTheir taxes and but scant attentionTo this weird underground invention,Until one mild March afternoon,As balmy as an English June,A Sunday, full of peaceful soundsAnd strolling tourists on their rounds,There came a change of quality.The game became reality.At sometime after three o'clockThe Thing they harboured in their RockDescended on them; out of the blue –Slaughter in Churchill Avenue,Panic amongst passers-byAs three young Irish people die,

Mown down by men with automatics.The story goes, they were fanatics,Dangerous terrorists, they said.Who, the assassins? No – the dead. It's sickening to hear them jawOf human rights and rule of law;Their favourite view of human rightsIs down a loaded Browning's sights;And as for rule of law, by God,Whose law ordains a murder squad?And murder it was, there on the Rock,For all their gales of gusty talk.Unarmed, unwarned, the Irish threeWere gunned down with malicious gleeBy a gang of mindless yahoo brutes,Great Britain's own Tonton Macoutes.

You meet them in the rugby clubsAnd in idyllic country pubs.The same white-collared yobbo clownsMolest old folk in market towns.All over Britain's blasted heathThey're springing up like dragons' teeth!Born bullies, no, not born but spawnedIn Yuppydom's malignant pond,For twenty years or so matured,With Bond and Rambo well manured,Until they're rotten-ripe and dropInto the Special Forces’ lap.This concentrates their pith, and purgesThem of their last human urges,Refining them to a noxious pearlWithin the Army's oyster shell.

Picture that dastardly attack,How, first, they shot them in the back,Straddled them where they lay half deadAnd pumped their bodies full of lead,Signing off with a shot in the face,The SAS's coup d'isgrace.Or was it the other way around?Did the victims turn at some slight sound,Throwing their hands up to provokeThe fatal words the Brownings spokeInto their ears or to their face?Such are the niceties of the case!Whichever way, that awful spillingOf human life was 'lawful killing' –Or so the inquest said it was:They had, they found, broken no laws,Were gentlemen all – all honourable,Their slight excess – exonerable.Ah, Gentlemen they were – indeed,Classic specimens of the breed.Note how, in their message back to base,Miss Farrell's name takes pride of place;At every stage 'twas Ladies First,Mairéad received their opening burst –Perhaps by way of a bouquetFor International Women's Day?

The full poem is an epic poem attacking the system that cloaked the murders, and has an introduction by Gerry Adams and preface by Séamus Deane. It is published in book form and is available from: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The price is £10 incl. p&p to UK and Ireland.

To mark IWD, we're publishing this poem from a new collection by Sheree Mack called skinshame, to be published shortly by Culture Matters.‘We’ll show you you’re a woman’ was the title of a report compiled by Human Rights Watch into the violence and discrimination experienced by black lesbians and transgender men in South Africa.

‘We'll Show You You're a Woman’in memory of Eudy Simelane

The minute you see likeness is when you realise that no matter what you're going through in your life, you are not alone- Zanele Muholi

a) On the outskirts of Johannesburg, she is finally cured.

b) The Namaqualand daisy is in flashy orange bloom.

c) They say Satan has a hold on her. She is a demon.

d) I am afraid to be myself.

e) In a park, on a moonless night, they each take their turn to correct her.

f) The township always smells of Omo washing powder,even when we have no water.

g) My mother says I must take a boyfriend. She invites the Pastor into our home to convert me.

h) No way a finger or tongue can satisfy you, he says. You need one of these to sort you out, he says as he pulls down his pants.

i) They find her naked body in a creek,stabbed 28 times, including the soles of her feet.

j) No one is saying anything. No one has been caught.

k) I sense the guys in my neighbourhood are planning something. They cannot accept me choosing a woman. My day will come.

Portugal’s president has described the circumstances in which a homeless Portuguese man died near the UK parliament as ‘inhumane’. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa paid tribute to the unnamed man found dead in an underpass near Westminster tube station, a stone’s throw from an entrance to the Houses of Parliament. In a statement on the official website of the president of the Portuguese republic, de Sousa said he ‘laments the death in inhumane circumstances of our fellow countryman of 35 years, who was found without life in one of the metro entries in the British capital’.

- The Guardian, 16th February, 2018

The Jesus note: not one that IPlay up but there's that lineOf his that goes'Look on me, all ye who pass by:Was ever grief like mine?'Bit lachrymose,You'll say, and on the whole I tryTo give no outward signOf inner woes,Though times there are when I could dieAnd none would grieve or pineExcepting thoseWho paused awhile to wonder whyThe tourist crowds confineTheir passing showsOf interest to Big Ben on highOr to the sty of swineOur nation knowsAs Parliament. Great place for myCampaign to take the shineOff its fake poseAs friend of every little guy,That time-dishonoured shrineTo freedom's foes.

There's lots of MPs walk my way,The Tories nose-in-airOr keen to showThey'd have me thrown in gaol todayIf it was left to theirBest judgment (knowThem by their rotten fruits, I say),And 'socialists' who'll spareSmall change then goOn endlessly about how they,The old guard, did their shareTo overthrowClass-prejudice or some clichéStamped 'vintage Tony Blair',And then – althoughAn off-note in that cabaret – Real socialists who'll dareTo halt the flowOf tourist-trade and disobeyThe bylaws with a rareAnd powerful showOf outrage fitted to convey'Blame that lot over there,Just a stone's throw'.

The Mail and Sun delight to callThem 'Corbynistas', theseNew types who seemA breed that’s worlds apart from allThe self-styled 'left' MPsWhose only dreamIs getting on, or playing ball,Or trying hard to pleaseWhatever teamOf crass time-servers have the gallTo pull their usual wheezeAnd switch mid-streamTo business-class. It's a long haulFor anyone who seesHow the regimeOf capital has us in thrall,Yet those who hold the keysLack any schemeTo buck the future or forestallA turning tide that freesThe distant gleamOf hopes renewed at every fallOf fortunes built on sleaze – The Levellers' theme!

Myself, I'll just hang on here tillThe next election (mustCome soon enough!)And then let's hope the people's willRevolts in sheer disgustAt folk who stuffTheir pockets, gourmandise their fill,And think it fair and justThat we sleep rough,Us whom the cold nights sometimes kill,Yet who retain their trust,When times are tough,That in the long death-dealing chillOf Tory rule we've sussedAn age-old bluffAnd figured how the plebs might stillFind the right ass to bust,Vow not to fluffIt yet again, but bend our skillAgainst those upper-crustClass-laws we’ll sloughOff like each parliamentary billNow set to bite the dustAt our rebuff.

That’s why the Corbynistas linkMy situation here,Begging for breadAnd living always on the brinkOf the deep freeze I fearLies just ahead,To Tory policies that syncA code-word like 'austere'With plans to shedAll care for those our masters thinkBeyond the civic sphere,Hence good as deadAlready. This new lot won't shrinkFrom setting out to clearThe Augean shedDespite the daily growing stinkOf many a privateerCaught short insteadOf mixing it with Graft Corp Inc,Advancing their career,And helping spreadThe moral rot at which we winkTill, of a sudden, we'reUnhoused, unfed.

Jenny Farrell introduces the life and poetry of Maxim Gorky, who was born 150 years ago, and presents his poem Storm Petrel, prophesying revolution.

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, or Maxim Gorky, was born 28 March 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod (named Gorky,1932-1990), and died 14 June 1936. He was a Russian and Soviet writer, the founder of socialist realism in literature, and a political activist.

Gorky’s father, a carpenter, died of cholera aged 31. The transition to his grandfather’s world of poverty and violence shocked him. His uncles stabbed their wives to death; one of them sent to Siberia. When Gorky visited the house of his childhood many years later, he could not enter it. Memories were too traumatic. Gorky owed his survival to his illiterate grandmother Akulina, whose storehouse of legends and fairy tales was inexhaustible.

Gorky’s grandfather taught him to read from the prayer book. The impoverished owner of a dye-house, he moved the family to the outskirts of town, where they lived among the outcast. The harshness of this existence stayed with Gorky for life.

His mother read secular books with him. Nearly nine in early 1877, he started elementary school, leaving it due to poverty, aged ten. All his life Gorky was aware of his lack of a formal education.

Only ten years old, he contributed to the family’s livelihood by collecting rags, nails, and horseshoes, or stealing wooden boards. His mother died of consumption that year, aged just 35. Alexei had to leave the house.

Along the Volga, he observed labourers and boatmen; he witnessed child prostitution in the towns. Depictions of violated women are among the most shocking scenes in Gorky’s writings.

Gorky’s stay in Kazan became a turning point. Here, he met people who not only suffered, but also fought to change social conditions. He felt inspired by the populists, or folk friends, members of a revolutionary movement of the 1870s. Stirred by passionate belief in the people, they sought political renewal; the more radical of them advocated revolution.

When the students went on strike at Kazan University, Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) was among them. Gorky joined a study circle, discussing emancipation. Serfdom had recently been abolished. The group debated Tolstoy’s ideas and asked Gorky to seek his advice on the creation of an agricultural colony.

In autumn 1888, Gorky began his years on the road, desiring to learn more of Russia and its people. After these travels, Gorky began writing. His story ‘Chelkash,’ about a harbour thief was an immediate sensation and Gorky was hailed the voice of the people. His pen name Gorky stems from that time. His father, Maxim, had been called the bitter one (“Gorky”) because he told people the bitter truth.

Gorky worked as a journalist and published the 3-volume ‘Sketches and Stories’ (1898-1899). He wrote with compassion and optimism about the barefooted and outcasts. His strong, colourful, keenly observed characters, affirm life and the power of humankind. He understood and depicted realistically their social context, at times, glorifying the rebels. At this early stage, Gorky met and befriended Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Lenin. Chekhov encouraged him to try drama, which resulted in his most famous play, ‘The Lower Depths’ (1902), based on his stories of outcasts, and without an individual hero. Stanislavsky directed the play in Moscow and it became an instant success in Europe and the US. Max Reinhardt’s theatre in Berlin, staged the play on 500 consecutive evenings. It became one of the most performed plays of world literature.

Gorky’s descriptions of the barefooted gained him a place in Russian literature. In the early 1890s, there were five million barefooted in Russia, due to the great famine. Many died of starvation, or perished in dirty hostels and overcrowded prisons. While in the past, the barefooted had been dismissed as wretched drunkards, thieves and murderers, Gorky describes them as confident people, rebels even, who defy the yoke of serfdom. Gorky’s hatred for the establishment had grown with his travels. He had experienced enormous class differences in Russia and ruthless oppression.

The first translations of Gorky’s work appeared in 1899: two years later Gorky was known worldwide. He made friends with the painter Repin, and the singer Shalyapin. His play “The Philistines”, the first time the working class appear on the Russian stage, was performed under police observation.

Gorky, exiled to Arzamas, central Russia, in 1902, met radicals there and supported the Social Democrats with money from his publications. He set up an illegal printing press, began publishing radical leaflets and hoped to achieve a united front of the working class and liberal intelligentsia. Russia’s war against Japan had shown that the Czarist Empire was on its last legs, opposition movements gained impetus.

On Bloody Sunday, 9 January1905, Czarist forces in St. Petersburg killed over a thousand demonstrators. Gorky’s arrest and imprisonment caused an international outcry, contributing to his release. Unrest spread across the country, students and workers went on strike, and the battle ship Potemkin’s crew mutinied. A general strike paralysed the country. The Czar had to introduce civil rights and convene a legislative assembly, the Duma. Gorky’s apartment looked like an arsenal. Workers rose, but surrendered after an eleven-day struggle.

In early 1906, Gorky travelled secretly to Finland where the Finns welcomed him enthusiastically. He met Lenin in Helsingfors. They decided that he should leave Russia and act as an unofficial ambassador for the new Russia, collecting money for the revolution. The US seemed suited for such a fundraising tour. American Socialists had put forward the plan. Sympathisers like Mark Twain and Jack London promised their Russian colleague help. Gorky topped the bestseller list and the Metropolitan Theatre played ‘The Lower Depths’ to a full house.

Gorky travelled via Berlin. He met with leaders of the German social democracy, Bebel, Kautsky, Liebknecht and Luxemburg. He saw Max Reinhardt and played Luca in ‘The Lower Depths’ at the Deutsches Theater. He urged all Western countries not to lend Russia money, warning it would go towards greater oppression.

For millions of Americans, Gorky’s name stood for Russian liberation. The trip was to be a goodwill tour from coast to coast. Arriving 10 April 1906, many greeted Gorky. Mark Twain called for support for the Russian Revolution. Gorky spoke of his enthusiasm for Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. He praised the liberty of the American people. However, his support of the trade union leaders charged with murdering a former governor in Idaho and, worse, the revelation that Gorky had travelled to America with his partner Maria, while still married to Katya was too much for puritan America. Even Mark Twain objected, as did William Dean Howells, and Roosevelt refused to receive him. One year later, George Bernard Shaw refused to go to America because of Gorky’s treatment.

Only John Martin and Prestonia Mann, leaders of the American Fabian Society, welcomed him in their home. Gorky went on a lecture tour through the USA, speaking in Williamsburg, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Increasingly, he criticised American society, and was sensitive to the Native Americans. He continued to praise Walt Whitman, pioneer of freedom and beauty, who filled his poems with a pagan love of life. He wrote several pamphlets commenting on the fetish of the dollar.

American publishers now no longer published Gorky’s books, mainly because newspaper magnate Hearst held the exclusive rights. Here in America, Gorky finished his play “Enemies” and began the novel “The Mother”. Both works deal with the workers’ unrest in Russia. In “Enemies” (1906) Gorky depicts class antagonism in capitalist society and the determined struggle of the proletariat. “The Mother” became the foundation text of socialist realism and one of the best-selling books of the 20th century. Gorky showed the rise of the workers’ movement, its revolutionary development under party leadership. For the first time, the proletarian revolutionary movement found realistic representation. With Pavel Vlasov, Gorky created a hero of the era – a proletarian revolutionary and party worker. The mother’s character vividly shows the growth of a revolutionary among the people.

Gorky’s attacks on the Russian government meant he could not return home. He received political asylum in Italy. He arrived in Naples on 26 October 1906, unaware that Italy would be his home for almost eight years and that he would write more than half of his works here. Gorky was already famous in Italy and his plays were performed to full houses. In November, he moved to Capri, where he received an invitation to the Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in London. The congress opened on 13 May1907 at the Southgate Brotherhood Church in Islington and lasted until 1 June. Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov attended. Gorky lectured on contemporary Russian literature in Hyde Park.

Many Russian writers visited him on Capri, as did Repin, Rachmaninov, Shalyapin and Stanislavski. He felt especially close to Shalyapin, compatriot from Nizhny Novgorod, who sang about the strength and beauty of the Russian homeland.

Gorky lived in Capri until 1913, when the Russian Duma passed an amnesty act to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Together with Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, he set up a “Party school” to educate working class leaders. Gorky lectured in the history of Russian literature. At that time, Gorky was close to Bogdanov, who advocated a “religion of socialism,” and Gorky coined the term “God-building,” combining religion with Marxism. Lenin disapproved, opposed the school and founded his own in Paris. Lenin rejected religion outright and thought Gorky a romantic.

On 31 December 1913, Gorky returned to Russia and helped establish the first Workers’ and Peasants’ University, the World Literature Publishing House, and Petrograd Theatre. He published the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy, “My Childhood” (1913-14), followed by “In the World” (1916), and “My Universities” (1922). In these, author-narrator Alyosha Peshkov, describes growing up in a Volga River town, and his youth.

When World War I broke out, Gorky lampooned the jingoism and ostracised his adopted son Zinovy Peshkov for joining the army, calling on conscripts to refuse military service.

In 1915, he founded a publishing house for children’s books, to promote children’s interest in good literature and giving them a sense of the purpose of life. He also intended to publish a series on outstanding people.

In 1921-22, Gorky fought against famine, cooperating with Fridtjof Nansen to bring food to Russia. He stated in an interview with the Daily Herald that there was no reason not to recognise the Soviet Union, and lifting the West’s economic boycott would save lives.

Gorky left the USSR again in October 1921. He was unwell, overworked, and he didn’t always see eye to eye with the Bolsheviks and Lenin. He travelled via Finland, Sweden and Denmark to Berlin. In Helsingfors, he promoted Russia aid and arrived in Berlin in November. More than 100,000 Russians lived in Berlin with many Russian publishing houses. In Berlin, a doctor found his condition serious. Between autumn 1916 and winter 1922, Gorky had not written a single line. Now, he finished “My Universities” and some novels. The situation in the USSR became increasingly insecure, with a trial against 34 members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Gorky settled in Sorrento. Gorky’s return to his homeland in the summer of 1928, was motivated in part by the opportunity to participate in its cultural life.

In “The Artamonov Business” (1927) Gorky began his post-revolutionary social-psychological analysis of capitalism. Based on three generations of a merchant family, the novel depicts the rise and fall of capitalism in Russia between 1863 and 1917. His play “Yegor Bulychov” set on the eve of the October Revolution, demonstrates the moral decline of the bourgeoisie. A subtle psychological analysis of bourgeois individualism between 1870 and 1917 makes “Klim Samgin” a masterpiece of socialist realism. In it, Gorky created a comprehensive tapestry of the political movements over forty years of Russian history and showed how the hero’s middle-class intellectual life ends in historical fiasco. The communist character Kutuzov meets Klim Samgin with true humanity. Gorky portrayed the new heroes, and heroism at work emerges as a key moral criterion.

Gorky’s socialist realist method is his ground-breaking world literary achievement. His works remain widespread on all continents and contribute to the consolidation of proletarian class-consciousness. They continue to be a touchstone and benchmark for socialist writers all over the world.

Storm Petrel

by Maxim Gorky

High above the silvery ocean winds are gathering the storm-clouds, and between the clouds and ocean proudly wheels the Stormy Petrel, like a streak of sable lightning.

Now his wing the wave caresses, now he rises like an arrow, cleaving clouds and crying fiercely, while the clouds detect a rapture in the bird’s courageous crying.

In that crying sounds a craving for the tempest! Sounds the flaming of his passion, of his anger, of his confidence in triumph.

The gulls are moaning in their terror – moaning, darting o’er the waters, and would gladly hide their horror in the inky depths of ocean.

And the grebes are also moaning. Not for them the nameless rapture of the struggle. They are frightened by the crashing of the thunder.

And the foolish penguins cower in the crevices of rocks, while alone the Stormy Petrel proudly wheels above the ocean, o’er the silver-frothing waters.

Ever lower, ever blacker, sink the storm-clouds to the sea, and the singing waves are mounting in their yearning toward the thunder.

Strikes the thunder. Now the waters fiercely battle with the winds. And the winds in fury seize them in unbreakable embrace, hurtling down the emerald masses to be shattered on the cliffs.

Like a streak of sable lightning wheels and cries the Stormy Petrel, piercing storm-clouds like an arrow, cutting swiftly through the waters.

He is coursing like a Demon, the black Demon of the tempest, ever laughing, ever sobbing –he is laughing at the storm-clouds, he is sobbing with his rapture.

In the crashing of the thunder, the wise Demon hears a murmur of exhaustion. And he knows the storm will die and the sun will be triumphant; the sun will always be triumphant!

The waters roar. The thunder crashes. Livid lightning flares in storm-clouds high above the seething ocean, and the flaming darts are captured and extinguished by the waters, while the serpentine reflections writhe, expiring, in the deep.

It’s the storm! The storm is breaking!

Still the valiant Stormy Petrel proudly wheels among the lightning, o’er the roaring, raging ocean, and his cry resounds exultant, like a prophecy of triumph –

they have a car a job with no contract they work for a company that hasa zero-tolerance policy on sick days and non-attendance they have aflat with heating and food they have a bottle of wine of a night they cook a pasta dinner for their two kids they try to buy their kids’ new clothes and a mobile phone but it’s never the right ones always 2 or 3 generations behind they are healthy but nervous strong but fragile they have nothing in their hands or tucked away under their beds they are only one withheld monthly pay cheque away from disaster one boss’s decisionaway from hunger one unfortunate accident away from annihilationone unplanned bill away from tipping point one illness away from seeing the whole edifice of their lives come tumbling downwith no one around to help putany of it backtogether again

This poem is from a new collection from Martin Hayes called The Things Our Hands Once Stood For.

Martin Hayes is the only British poet who writes consistently and seriously about work, and about the insanity of a society where employees are seen as mere ‘hands’ whose sole role is to make money for the employer.

The publisher and poet Alan Dent has contributed an illuminating introduction. He says,

Hayes speaks for those whose lives are supposed to be not worth speaking about. He is intent on revealing the significance of the lives of ordinary people in the workplace. When current employment relations are consigned to the dustbin of history, and are viewed as we now view the feudal relations between lord and vassal, will people wonder why so little was written about it?

Martin’s poems are direct and simple, and full of black humour. Like the grainy black and white images that illustrate them so well, they expose and express the simple, terrible truth – that the human relation on which our society is based, that between employer and employee, is morally indefensible. The clear message of his poetry is that those who do the work should own, control, and benefit fully from it. They should, in the last words of the last poem, ‘start the revolution that will change everything’, and show that

all of our fingertips combinedmight just be the fingertipsthat keep us and this Universestitched together.

The booklet is priced at £6 (plus £1.50 p&p), and is available from here, Manifesto Press and the usual outlets. ISBN 978-1-907464-32-4.

And what did she get, the girlfriend,from the student union meetingat which he rose to his feetand realised he could speak? From that meeting she gotthe Snickers bar he forgot to eatso busy was he watching them listen;and that speech, unabridged, every other night for thirty five years.

And what did she get, his new wife, from the time he first used a party conference microphone to agree with both sides?Those okay with the Moslems/Mexicans/Gypsies being here,and those who want them kept over there.From that microphone she took away their invitation to dine with the Deputy Mayorand his not new wife.

And what did she get, his no longer new wife,when, at the second attempt, he won that seat on the City Council? From his election she got to drink Pinot Noirand go swimming in their private clubwith the no-so-new wives of those who got the contracts to make the paving stones and installthe pay-and-display ticket machines during his years as Chairmanof the relevant committee.

And what did she get, his well-maintained wife,the night he was elected to the big shinyparliament? From that night she took awayan architect to re-design their new three storey padin the priciest possible part of the capital,and an article about herselfin the Daily Express lifestyle pages.

And what did she get, the no longer new MP’sno longer new wife, the morning they made him Minister?That morning she got to go horse ridingwith the Leader of the House of Lords’ fourth (or fifth) wife.

And what did she get, the no longer newCabinet Minister’s wife, the night the landslidemade him Prime Minister? That nightshe got to hold to her breastinvitations to break foie graswith the Sultan of Brunei, the President of China;and the chance to write husband’s speechannouncing the crackdown on beggars who accost hard working families who stop to ask for directionsen route to the nearest funeral parlour.

And what did she get, the ex-Prime Minister’s no longer new wife, from all the depleted uranium shellshe had dropped during the Battle of Basra, all the soldiers he sent to meet improvised explosive devices in far Mesopotamia in the hopeof getting rid of something biggerthan the beggars and prostitutes at Kings Cross. For these she gotwhite night terrors of him on trial for all their crimes,and the desire to never againlook out the front window of their fineConnaught Square houseat the tree from which, it’s said,they used to once string traitors.

Here's Ken Loach reading part of the poem and talking about the suspension of Kevin Higgins from the Labour Party. Higgins was suspended in June 2016, but now it looks as if he's unsuspended and is in the members' database again, although he hasn't been notified about it.

Higgins says: "It appears the boys and girls of the fantastically named 'Compliance Unit' at Labour Party Headquarters have decided that the case against me is too silly. But they don't want to tell me this in writing, as this way they retain the option of deciding, at some later stage, that I am guilty after all. On finding himself, at one stage during his varied career, imprisoned in a castle in Romania, the literary critic Georges Lukacs is said to have said that Kafka was a realist after all. It is a tragedy for world literature that Mr Kafka never got to exchange emails with the Labour Party Compliance Unit."

To mark the 170th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Peter Raynard presents his new poem, a 'poetic coupling' based on the text of the Manifesto.

Counting in at around 12,000 words, has there ever been a more influential book containing so few words, than the Communist Manifesto? The 21st February, 2018 is the 170th anniversary of its publication. Written in a six-week rush, after the Communist League imposed a deadline on Marx, its take up and influence has been phenomenal, and it is as relevant today as it ever has been.

Much is planned to mark the occasion, especially as it is also the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth on May 5th. I have read the Manifesto a number of times over the year. However, as a poet, I hadn’t given it much thought in my writing until I was introduced to a poetic form called ‘coupling’, devised by the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. Coupling is a line by line poetic response (that includes rhyme, repetition, and assonance) to an existing text. It can be applied to any text but I think works very well with political writing, either as a way of making it relevant to today’s readers, or as a (satirical) polemic against it. In writing a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto I took the former approach but - in the spirit of Marxism - with a critical as well as creative eye.

I hope to complete the poem over the next few weeks, and the plan is that Culture Matters will then publish it in May in time for the 200th anniversary. Below is my coupling of the infamous ‘preface’ of the book, as well as Marx’s ten ‘commandments’ of communism.

The Communist Manifesto: A Poetic Coupling

by Peter Raynard (with Karl Marx)

“In accordance with my state of mind at the time lyrical poetry was bound to be my first subject, at least the most pleasant and immediate one….Poetry however, could be and had to be only an accompaniment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with philosophy.” [Marx’s letter to his Father, November 1837]

PREFACE

A spectre is haunting Europeinnit though

— the spectre of communismthat loose blanket in need of tucking in

All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre this unholy spectre come to remove the opium and Xanax flow from the ennui of its existents

Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Pope and President, Merkel Macron, autoimmune free radicals of capitalism, each playing I spy with my belittling eye

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Karl saw a gap in the market before the market had been fully formed

Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism no-one likes us, no-one likes us, no-one likes us, we don’t care, we are commies, new-born commies, we are commies from over there

against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?we are coming with sickles and fists, hammers and molotovs, balaclavas and masks, & pen and paper (just in case)

Two things result from this fact: I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a poweralbeit a power with a crackly track record of misuse, one dictatored by substance abuse

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole worldcome out and tell it how it is FFS, it has been 170 years but it’s never too late!

publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, they tend to hang to the left, last I heard, but added ingredients can make it absurd

and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itselfring a ring a roses you pocketful of posers, atishoo, atishoo, we will knock off your crown

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in Londonto mark the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, to honour his will, to update his worth

and sketched the following manifestogive him a deadline and he’ll give you a tract, the theory, the practice, revolutionary acts

to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages& Bakunin translated it into Russian, and we all know how that turned out

Workers, by Peter Kennard

Marx’s Ten Commandments of Communism

………..in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicablebehold, the secular ten commandments, scribed in the original Manifest der kommunistischen Partei

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose I suggest we begin with cutting the hedge funds, the casino capitalism, the prospecting close your eyes and pick a card path to prosperity

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax in the heated climate of today’s reprobates, they’ll not be much need for public debate

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritanceCan I keep my granddad’s watch, it’s broken, it’s worthless, it means a lot?

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels there’ll be no more capital flight, those runways closed at midnight

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly credit where credit is due, an economy not founded on a global debt of $233 trillion, phew!

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the Stateyes traveller I’m just putting you through, can you believe it, no trains overdue

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the Stateof factories, mere metal filings remain, big data now is the name of the game

the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/ Shall I at least set my lands in order (TSE)

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country the green with the grey, cosmopolitan hue, no borders, no hoarders, no get in the queue

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.with child labour/girls denied education/born into sex work we mustn’t forget this is not done-and-dusted, those wheels have not come off yet, though they may be a little rusted

Marx’s Final Words

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains With links made of debt, disease, war, racism, sexism, capitalism, and more

They have a world to winand win it they will, for as Prometheus was Bound to say, ‘defy power which seems omnipotent’

Working Men of All Countries, Uniteand women as well, and all those between

Since July 2017 Rip Bulkeley has been creating an anthology "Poems for Grenfell Tower", which will be published by The Onslaught Press at Easter. Poems were invited in any language and up to 50 lines long, and then selected blind by a small review panel. The resulting collection includes 62 poems, four of them not in English but with translations, some by well-known authors, others by people closely touched by the Grenfell atrocity. Royalties will go to the new Grenfell Foundation, which is being set up by Grenfell United in order to receive such donations and use them for the benefit of the community.

There will be two London launches with free admission and collections for Grenfell United:

Further events based on the book will be held between in Edinburgh, Newport, Doncaster, Newcastle, and probably in other London venues, with poets not in the book invited to read their own responses to Grenfell also.

The sonnet below has been written to open the collection.

Grenfell, 2018

by Rip Bulkeley

So, pull down the monument of Britain’s shame?It’s not enough. The horror and the griefMay some day ease; insomnia and strainGive ground before the impetus of life.And perhaps the dead have other things in mindThan Grenfell Night, more practical concerns…But years will not dispel the stench of crime.The cremated steel and concrete ghost will scornMere demolition; rather, persevereFor children’s children’s schoolchildren to readAnd wonder, with stilled hands and hidden care,At how their ancestors were torched for greed,But then the neighbourhood rose up through fireTo stand together, one with Grenfell Tower.